I believe this is a fact. You can also see blackbirds turn their heads sideways against the ground. I don't remember this particular show, baileys, but I don't think Bill is quite ready for the funny farm yet.

Having never listened for worms, I don't really know what they sound like!!!

It must be so. Watching blackbirds in our garden, they seem to be listening, then sometimes make three or four attempts before they come up with a worm in their beak. If they could see the worm, they'd grab it first try.

This has been discussed thoroughly and the consensus appears to agree with this excerpt from American Robin: Most scientists now conclude that robins find worms by vision, thanks to experiments by an ornithologist named Frank Heppner. In his experiments, Heppner investigated all the robin's senses. Heppner established that vibrations, odors, and sounds do NOT help robins find worms. Instead, robins SEE worms inside their burrows or wiggling on the ground. Robins **** their heads to improve their ability to look at the ground. Some robins find worms the EASY way; they learn that worms emerge from burrows after rain, which can make them really easy to pick up on sidewalks.And from The New York City Naturalist: With their heads cocked toward the ground, almost as if listening for worms, the Robin will suddenly strike with its bill and pull an earthworm from the ground. Ornithologists now know that Robins use their keen eyesight to find birds, not their hearing.

Yes I'm sure he's right, black birds do have highly attuned sences, I've even seen them doing a little pitter patter "rain dance" on the grass to fool the worm into thinking its raining, so up the worm comes before its hole gets flooded...and gotcha. I've seen them perform thie little trick many atime, or maybe I'm going ****** too ?

You probably mispelled it, Thunderbird+, since the word censored on my post is ' c0ck his head'...There appears to be disagreement (I'm schocked!) among people who study these sorts of things. This from a recent study by Robert Montgomerie & Patrick J. Weatherhead, Department of biology, Queens University: Most diurnally active birds appear to be visuallyoriented foragers. Birds seem poorly adaptedfor localizing prey by hearing because their relativelysmall heads produce little sound shadowand their closely set, inconspicuous ears generatesmall interaural time differences (Knudsen 1980).None the less, songbirds have reasonably goodauditory abilities as evidenced by numerousstudies of song detection and discrimination (e.g.McGregor 1991). Further evidence of the soundlocalizingabilities of songbirds comes from anexperimental study of Australian black-backedmagpies, Gymnorhina tibicen, foraging on buriedscarab beetle, Rhopaea verreauxi, larvae withauditory, vibrotactile and visual cues masked ina variety of combinations (Floyd & Woodland1981). Magpies were able to find the buried larvaeexclusively by localizing the low-amplitude, lowfrequency sounds made when the larvae wereburrowing or feeding.Contd.

American robins are common garden birds overmuch of North America and their distinctiveforaging behaviour is well known, although littlestudied (Heppner 1965; Eiserer 1980; Paszkowski1982; Swihart & Johnson 1986). Earthworms maycomprise up to 20% of their diet (Kalmbach 1914;Howell 1941), particularly during the breedingseason, and these are typically captured on mown lawns. Our own field observations (as opposed to above referenced Heppner) of robins foragingsuggested to us that they might also use othersensory modes while searching for earthworms.When they c0ck their head they appear to belistening (see also Tyler 1949), and we havewatched robins successfully foraging on lawnswhere the grass was long enough to make earthwormsdifficult to see. We also watched a captiverobin catch earthworms buried in soil where wecould detect no visual cues that would reveal anearthworm�s location. Thus it seemed to us thatauditory, olfactory or vibrotactile cues might beused in addition to visual cues when localizingprey. Our objective in this study was to testexperimentally the ability of captive robins to useeach of these sensory modalities when huntingfor worms. So, take your pick!